The Piri Reis Map: What a 1513 Fragment Really Shows — and What It Doesn't

2025-07-26 · Impossible Objects · 2 min read

In the autumn of 1929, Topkapi Palace in Istanbul — for centuries the seat of the Ottoman sultans — was being turned into a museum. The German theologian Gustav Adolf Deissmann, invited to survey the palace library's manuscripts, came upon a torn piece of gazelle-skin parchment painted with coastlines, ships and compass roses. It was the surviving third of a world map drawn in 1513 by Piri Reis, an Ottoman admiral and one of the finest cartographers of his age.

The fragment would be remarkable on its own terms. In notes written on the map itself, Piri Reis explains his method: he compiled it from about twenty sources — eight maps going back to Ptolemy, an Arab map of India, four recent Portuguese charts, and a map made by Christopher Columbus. Since Columbus's own maps are lost, this fragment is the closest surviving echo of how the discoverer of the Americas drew what he had found. One note adds that details came from a Spanish prisoner who claimed to have sailed with Columbus. Not one of the twenty source maps has ever been found.

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